Hockey players might love playing hockey. But they don’t always like watching it. Certainly not once their own season is done.

After all, most hockey players wants to be reminded of what could have been.

Jack Eichel is not like most hockey players.

The Buffalo Sabres captain watched the entire playoffs even though his team failed to qualify for them. He watched from the beginning as the Lightning and Flames got upset in the first round and he watched until the end as the Hurricanes and Blues went further than anyone could have imagined.

He saw former teammate Ryan O’Reilly, a player whom Buffalo had traded to St. Louis for practically nothing, hoist the Stanley Cup.

In fact, he had a great view of it.

“Ten rows up off the ice,” Eichel said last week during the NHL Player Media Tour in Chicago.

Yes, Eichel, bought a ticket for Game 7 of the Cup final. He sat in the stands at TD Garden in Boston. He called it a “cool experience.” Others might have called it “torturous.”

It’s bad enough that Eichel has spent the past four years down the road from the Maple Leafs, where he’s constantly reminded of how a rebuild is supposed to work. But once the season ended, he headed back home to a suburb outside of Boston, where the reminders of all that he has been missing were further amplified.

The Bruins, who play in a city of champions, were in their third Cup final in nine years. The Blues, meanwhile, won their first Stanley Cup to end a championship drought that was only three years longer than the Sabres’.

Why bother? Why not book a flight to Cancun and forget about hockey altogether?

“I wanted to go for the experience and it was a great experience,” said Eichel. “It was 30 minutes from my house at my parents, so it was easy to go in and go to the game. It was a cool experience. Just seeing the celebration and the emotion that was shown from the guys, it makes you want it that much more.”

It’s hard to imagine Eichel needing any more motivation.

We talk about how the Edmonton Oilers have wasted three of the first four years of Connor McDavid’s career. But what Eichel has gone through might be even worse.

He’s never made the playoffs. He’s never even come close.

And yet, if there was a lesson learned from watching the Blues win it all last season, it was that even when you’re not close, you’re actually closer than you may think.

The Sabres finished the year ranked 13th out of 16 teams in the Eastern Conference, but they had been the best team in the NHL after winning 10 straight games at the end of November. The Blues, meanwhile, were the worst team in the NHL at the beginning of January before turning things around in the second-half of the season.

Flip their scripts and it could have been Eichel coming off a Cup hangover these days. Or at least that’s the message heading into this year.

“Of course, you think about it,” said Eichel. “Last year, we started well and ended bad. You look at St. Louis and they did the complete opposite. Yeah, you see the post-game celebrations, the fans, the crowds and everything like that and you just want it that much more.”

It’s not just Eichel who was motivated from watching the Blues. It was impossible for the whole hockey world not to take notice.

A year after an expansion team went to the Stanley Cup final, parity ran amok in the NHL. Whether it was the Islanders reaching the second round without John Tavares or the Presidents’ Trophy winner getting swept by the 16th-seeded team, anything can happen in the playoffs. You just have to get in.

“It could have been us,” said Chicago’s Patrick Kane, whose team was only six points out. “I think going forward that will be the message for a lot of teams in the league if they’re struggling at that point in the season. You can now look at what St. Louis did.”

It wasn’t that the Blues just got into the playoffs. It was how they got in. The team might have been lost for the first-half of the season, but no one was hotter in the final few months, when it mattered the most.

“It’s not like they came out of nowhere, because they had the team to play like that,” said Rangers goalie Henrik Lundqvist, whose team finished two points ahead of the Sabres. “That’s the difference between a team under-performing and maybe a bad team playing their best. It’s a big difference.”

Did the Sabres underperform or were they just not good enough?

That’s the question as the Sabres enter the season under new head coach — Eichel’s third in five years — Ralph Krueger. Of course, getting into the playoffs won’t be easy. Not when the Sabres are playing in a division that includes the Lightning, the Bruins, the Leafs and a Panthers team that won the off-season by hiring head coach Joel Quenneville and signing free agent goalie Sergei Bobrovsky in the summer

“There’s so many good players, good teams in the division,” said Eichel. “It’s tough. It’s tough for sure. But it’s a good challenge.”

And it’s a challenge that doesn’t seem so impossible. After all, Eichel has seen the impossible. And he’s seen it with his own two eyes.

EICHEL AIMING HIGHER

Jack Eichel set career-highs last season by scoring 28 goals and 82 points in 77 games. It was the first time that the Buffalo Sabres captain averaged more than a point per game and the first time that he finished among the top 25 in scoring.

So what does he do for an encore? Build on those numbers, of course.

“You just want to get better. You want to improve on everything from last year,” he said. “I think the big thing for me is to just trying to score more goals. Try to find the back of the net more. I think that’s something that I want to do. It’s one of the goals I had this summer.”

Part of the reason why Eichel, who considers himself a pass-first centre, didn’t reach the 30-goal mark was because winger Jeff Skinner, who had 40 goals, was so good at filling the back of the net.

Eichel said setting up his linemate is still the priority. But for a team that tied for 23rd in offence, the more goals Eichel can score, the better.

“You want to be a better leader, you want to be a better teammate, you want to help the team win more games,” he said. “Whatever it is I have to do. But I think if I score more goals, it will help the team.”

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